App Reviews

It's hard out there for a photo app these days. After the runaway success of Instagram, a lot of imitators popped up thinking that if they offered the same "snap, filter and share" features, users would flock to them, as well.

Sadly, this means that we have legions of piss-poor imitations without any clear alternatives; as the filter features became more ubiquitous, they almost provoke a roll of the eyes when announced.

Despite Twitter making it difficult for developers to maintain third-party clients, they just keep popping up. This week, we take a look at Falcon Pro, which seems to marry the idea of beauty, functionality, and smooth animations into a solid contender for the best of its kind.

Hey look, we're in this screenshot!

Falcon Pro had roots as Falcon, a Twitter widget that was fully-functional and looked damned good, to boot.

When I first covered Pixlr Express a few days ago, I noted that the presence of a photo editing app was odd in Autodesk's lineup of powerful tools. Having developed apps like ForceEffect, 360 Mobile, and AutoCAD WS, you'd think Autodesk was marketing to power users who want to design, edit, animate, and engineer from the palm of their hand. Still, Autodesk's first foray into the mobile photo editing world – Pixlr-o-matic – was a hit.

PC gamers alive in the 1990's will remember the XCOM series of games as bastions of the strategy genre. In each, you took control of a global organization that was tasked with defending the Earth from aliens; you did so in turn-based missions, where you killed enemies, escorted VIPs, and defended objectives.

Now imagine that (with some tweaks, of course) on Android.

The premise of The Hunters: Episode One is relatively simple: you are the leader of a team of mercenaries, and you can take different contracts on a daily basis.

While there seems to be no shortage of Twitter clients on the Google Play store, they all seem to be a mixed bag of different features and reliability. Some will do push, while others are free; some won't do notifications, and some animations are downright sluggish. Sadly, unless you have the time to go through every app to see which one fits the best, you'll likely need to settle for "close enough."

Echofon looks to add one more to the pile with the beta of their popular client.

I've been using Pandora for a while now. I honestly don't remember when I started - maybe around early 2008. The web client has been a standby for me, even as the ads have grown more frequent, intrusive, and lengthy. I don't really mind. But since picking up my first Android phone, a Nexus One, back in 2010, I've never been too fond of the official app.

Sure, it works, but the speed, stability, and reliability of streaming have never been particularly good, despite numerous major updates.

It's been quite a while since we've delved into the realm of root apps on Android, so let's get to it. If you're rooted and not taking advantage of it, why even bother? The Android development community is ready and waiting to help you master your device.

The apps on this list have been carefully selected as "must-have" apps for root users. Well, what are you waiting for? Read on for eight more great root apps.

I'm going to start this review out with a gigantic disclaimer: I used PlayStation Mobile on a rooted Nexus 7, per Artem's instructions, hardware that it wasn't technically designed for. The service should run on just about any (rooted) Android device, as well as natively on most recent Sony phones and tablets. At least some of the games in the store are also available on the PlayStation Vita. Other Android users are having trouble (even I had to flash to a stock, rooted backup), so stability and performance may certainly have been somewhat off while I used the service.

I make no bones of the fact that I find 3rd party voice assistants to be increasingly redundant, especially with the arrival of Google Now on Jelly Bean.

But Google Now doesn't do certain things. One of those things has annoyed me since the early days of Google's Voice Actions: you can't make calendar events through voice input. And as a person that absolute despises digital calendars, this is something of a "must have" feature.

As a tech writer, I read a lot of RSS feeds. Hundreds, maybe more. All day, every day. It's one of the first things I check every morning, and the last before bed. And dozens of times throughout the day. When I first started as a writer, Google Reader was my go-to RSS reader, both on my PCs and mobile. It didn't take long to realize GR's shortcomings on both platforms, however.